Coming to Terms
by frombluetored
Summary: "But no one is in control of time. Not really." A brief conversation between the Doctor and Clara leads to the Maitland's acquiring a week-long visitor. A visitor who happens to know very little about domestic life.


You can count days in hours, in the setting of the sun, in muttered goodnights. You can keep track of each twenty-four hour period by penciling in a line in a notebook, or by baking another soufflé, or calling up your dad before bed. These are the ways that Clara Oswald learns to keep control of time as it slips between her fingers.

Sometimes she gets the strong illusion that life is really just one chase after another. She wakes up, chest heaving and throat burning, convinced her time had run out once again. And in the best of cases, that panic fades moments after waking. In the worst, it lingers until Wednesdays.

"When you've lived as long as we have, time shrinks. It kind of…folds up into itself. There seems to be less of it available the more you've used up." The Doctor tells her. He looks at her face from across the console, his shaded and worried. She wonders, in that moment, if she should have mentioned her struggling at all.

"Well, is it true?" She finally asks him. She realizes she's been gripping the console so tightly her knuckles are white. She drops her sweaty palms to her sides.

"Is what true?" He asks.

"That there's less of it left."

He smiles softly. When he circles over to where she's standing, he rests a palm against the middle of her back and places his other hand over hers. He guides it to a lever.

"We're in control of time right now. What do you think?" He asks.

She's grinning and breathing easier than she has all week as she slams the lever down.

* * *

But no one is in control of time. Not really.

"One day I'm going to be old." She informs him. They're walking hand in hand down a street in New York City, listening to the sound of jazz flittering after them from a concert at Central Park. His gloved hand is warm in hers and each time he smiles at her, she gets the urge to pull him in closer.

She's turning twenty-five very soon (or might already be, considering she sometimes lives full weeks in the span of a few hours) and she can feel time burrowing down into her skin.

"I'm already old." He answers. It's an empty-handed answer and it leaves Clara aching for more. She tugs playfully on his hand and knocks into his side.

"Yeah, but you've got the body of a thirty-year old." She points out. "My body's going to get frail and old and worn, until it eventually stops working."

She knows now that these are words you aren't supposed to say to the Doctor. She knows he's more than aware of the fragility of his human companions, of their too-short lifespans. But she needs to know what happens to her then. She needs to know what he'll think about it.

His hand tightens around hers, almost to the point of pain, and he won't meet her eyes. He stares forward, his jaw working, and says nothing as they walk. It isn't until the music has all but faded behind them that he responds.

"That's the biggest tragedy of my life. After all I've done, I haven't found a way to fix that. I haven't found a way to save you all from that."

She doesn't say anything, because she's not even sure if she'd want to be saved from that. It's something her mother was denied.

Later, she decides to take a nap in the TARDIS before returning back to the Maitlands. She wakes to a hesitant knock on her door.

"Is something on fire?" She asks him, her voice a little slurred from sleep.

"Fire? No. No, definitely not." He responds, a little too quickly for her liking. She sits up, the blankets pooling at her waist, and watches as he hesitantly walks through the doorway. He perches on the edge of her bed, nervously fiddling with his bowtie. Clara frowns.

"Doctor? What's wrong?" She asks. Her hand barely grasps his when he's pulling his away. He kicks his feet, almost like Artie does while watching television, and stares at them, saying nothing. When he finally speaks, he doesn't meet her eyes.

"I miss you." He tells her, and his voice is heavier than she's ever heard before.

Led by her instincts, she's sitting beside him with her arm around him in less than a minute. For once, he allows himself to be comforted.

"I'm not going anywhere." She tells him. She leans her head against his shoulder and he presses his lips to the crown of her head. He leaves his face there after he kisses her, his breath warming her scalp, and she's afraid to say anything else because she's terrified he'll start crying again. It's one of the few things she isn't sure she can handle.

* * *

When he arrives next Wednesday, he's different somehow.

He goes straight to the door, immediately after parking the TARDIS, and rings the doorbell eight times in one minute.

"Cool it, Chin Boy!" Clara screams at the door as she hurries down the stairs.

When she throws it open, he's almost impossibly happy. He reaches out and takes her face between his hands and plants a kiss on her forehead.

"My Clara!" He says happily. "Hello!"

Clara looks at him, a little suspiciously, after he pulls her into a tight hug. They've been closer than ever since Trenzalore, and he's been much more open with his affection, but something seems a little odd to her.

He falters for a second as he looks her over for the first time, his mouth pulling down into a frown.

"Why're you in that and not your adventuring clothes?" He asks. Clara glances down at herself, at her apron and bare feet, and then back up at him. She suddenly dreads telling him what she has to.

"There's a complication." She says.

He frowns even harder. His thin eyebrows practically meet.

"Complication? What complication? Tell me when it started and I'll go back in time and stop it."

She shakes her head and then steps back, opening the door wider in an invitation for him to come inside. This automatically makes him suspicious.

"Well, I'm not going to sit down, because no good news ever comes when you have to sit down for it." He warns her as he steps inside. She chuckles as she closes the door.

"It's not terrible news, Doctor. I'm just tired of standing in the doorway. It's cold." She tells him.

Once she's sitting on the steps and he's (true to his word) standing very stiffly in front of him, she explains.

"Mr. Maitland's at a conference for work."

The Doctor stares.

"So send Angie and Artie to the cinema, we'll be back in time." He answers. "I've been thinking about this place we should visit, it has—"

She interrupts before he goes on another one of his Doctor rants.

"Not just for the day. He's going to be gone for an entire week, so it's just me here with the kids, and I really can't risk going off. If something happened to me, there'd be no one here to take care of them."

He bristles very obviously. His arms flail and he quickly folds them to his chest, his mouth drawn into a thin line.

"_Nothing_ is going to happen to you. Not ever." He says.

Clara rolls her eyes. "Until you can swear that to me, without the slightest sliver of doubt, I'm afraid we'll have to wait until next Wednesday." When she sees his frown grow, she continues. "Why's it matter so much, anyway? Just pop back into your TARDIS and go to next Wednesday. I'll be waiting in something more adventure-y then."

She rises and heads over to the door, prepared to see him out, but he doesn't budge. His green eyes are large and almost sad as he stares at her.

"Because…because that's next Wednesday." He tells her, as if that's obvious. When she gives him a confused look, he continues. "That would make this Wednesday a wasted Wednesday. That would make us have one less Wednesday together in the long run."

She stops with her hand resting on the door handle, her heart rising into her throat. She swallows against the lump, suddenly putting two and two together. She hadn't realized her conversation with him in 1920s New York City had affected him.

She's not sure what to do, because it's obvious all of this is hurting him a bit more than she would have anticipated, but she knows it would be too dangerous to leave right now. She's hardly ever back by the time the Doctor tells her she will be, but normally it isn't a problem because Mr. Maitland is there to take care of things until she returns. But now it's just her, and as much as she might not like to admit it sometimes, the household would pretty much come to a standstill without her.

She gives him a choice, without even really thinking it through. She just knows that he looks sad, and she doesn't like when he looks that way.

"The hose hasn't been working right. It sputters." She informs him, matter-of-factly.

She knows he'll either mutter something in his overly-scientific jargon and run back off to his TARDIS, or stay, but she isn't sure which one he'll pick. The important part is that she gave him the choice.

He fixes his suit jacket.

"Sputtering, you say? Hoses aren't supposed to sputter. I was there when they were invented."

With that, he's winding his way down the foyer, his hand already reaching inside his jacket for his sonic. She smiles to herself when she hears the buzzing as the backdoor opens.

She walks back upstairs to finish putting Artie's clean clothes away. She's only got one more shirt left when Angie and Artie stick their heads in.

"Clara, your alien boyfriend's fighting with the hose." Angie tells her. Artie's giggling beside her, his hand pressed over his mouth. Clara drops the shirt back into the hamper and turns to them, a sigh already forming.

"What do you mean exactly?" She presses, already aware where this is going.

"I mean he's rolling around on the ground, tangled up in the hose, screaming something about "Daleks", whatever those are." Angie continues. She pulls her phone from her pocket and begins texting, her eyes now permanently glued to the screen. "Have you seen my blue jumper? Nina wants to go see that new movie tonight and I want to wear it."

Clara hurriedly closes Artie's drawers, the last shirt put away, and picks the hamper back up.

"I just put it in your closet. I'll be right back, I'm going to check on the Doctor." She tells her, a little distractedly. She should have known the Doctor plus a hose was probably a bad idea.

"I'm coming! I want to say hi!" Artie says. Clara gives him a smile and stops her progression towards the door, feeling a little bad for not even greeting them. She sets the hamper down on the floor and pulls him in for a hug, because he still lets her do that, and then sets a brief hand on Angie's shoulder.

"I hope you two had a good day." She tells them. She picks the hamper back up and ignores Angie's snort. She listens to Artie retell his day as they walk to the backyard.

"—toad! I didn't know that, and now I was wondering, Clara, if maybe you could tell my dad that it would be in my best academic interests to—"

"Clara! Artie! Splendid!" The Doctor screams, cutting Artie off as they walk out into the yard. Clara presses her fingers to her temple and sighs at the sight before her. The Doctor's lying on the ground, the hose wrapped all around him, and for some reason it appears to be moving about on its own.

"Is our hose an alien?!" Artie screams at the Doctor.

The Doctor fights against the hose a few more times before falling slack against the ground, panting a bit.

"No, Artie, not an alien!" He says. He frowns a moment later, though. "Although, actually…"

Clara hurries over after that, deciding to save the Doctor from his wild speculation.

"What in the world did you do?" She demands. She kneels down beside him and examines the situation. The hose appears to be jerking wildly, and while it appeared to be animated from affair, she realizes it's got a kink in it and the water pressure's building up inside of it.

"The important thing is that I fixed the sputtering!" The Doctor tells her. He half-heartedly tries to wiggle out once again, only to tangle himself up worse.

"Right." Clara tells him. She rises to her feet. "Just a mo'."

She walks over to the house and turns the water off. She turns and watches, her arms crossed over her chest, as the hose falls still. The Doctor lets out a cheer and Artie joins in, having been watching the drama from afar. He hurries over to help the Doctor untangle himself. Clara joins them and, together, the three of them sort out the tangled situation.

The Doctor's all smiles as he rises to his feet.

"I was right! Hoses don't sputter. There was a kink in the hose."

A kink that he had obviously made worse somehow. He picks his sonic up out of the grass and begins to scan over the hose until, finally, he locates the spot. Artie and Clara watch as he lifts the hose and straights it, a grin on his face.

"Sorted!" He says proudly.

Clara can't help but laugh then, and she has a feeling her invitation to the Doctor was either a very bad idea or a very good one. Only time will tell.

When they walk back in, the Doctor still doesn't appear to be making any sort of beeline for the door. Clara makes them all some tea while Artie and the Doctor talk about what's been going on at school lately. When she walks back into the living room with the cups, she stops in the doorway, because the warmth from the tea cups somehow traveled to her heart. The Doctor's sitting beside Artie on the couch, peering with him at a homework worksheet, their heads bowed together. Artie's asking questions and the Doctor's giving him actual, informative answers, and Clara's trying not to let it make her smile, but the Doctor with children has always been a weakness of hers. She'd all but given up on her fight not to fall in love with him, but even if she hadn't, this probably would have done her in.

She continues making her way back into the living room after that. She carefully sets the mugs down on the table and sits in the armchair beside the couch, sipping her tea slowly and watching. She realizes she's glad the Doctor's here, because even though she knew how to help Artie with this homework, it wasn't something she particularly enjoyed working on. History was never her favorite and nothing really compared to the Doctor's firsthand knowledge.

He helps Artie for an hour, and when they're finished, he almost seems unaware that that much time had passed. He lifts his mug to his lips for the first time and then frowns.

"It's cold." He states.

Clara lifts her eyebrows. "It's been sitting there for an hour."

The Doctor looks mildly surprised. "An hour! Human stuff really consumes time, doesn't it? Never thought it did before, though. One time I spent a few months on Earth, back when those cube-things landed, and I remember it being excruciating!"

He continues to sip his tea anyway. Clara tries not to grimace.

"Well, I'm glad being here isn't excruciating."

She rises to carry her and Artie's empty mugs back to the kitchen, and the Doctor follows. She can feel his eyes on her as she rinses them out in the sink.

"Maybe I could stay and help some more." He suggests, his voice overtly casual. Clara smiles, her back to him still.

"Maybe you could." She responds. She dries her hands on a dish towel and then spins back around to face him.

He's smiling softly, excitedly.

"I could plant some flowers by the mailbox, that would look nice! Or synchronize the energy fluxes of the water pressure and electricity circuits! Or—or—buy a dog!"

"No dog." Clara corrects.

"Or buy some Jammie Dodgers!" He amends.

Clara crosses over to the pantry and pulls the unopened package out. She told herself at the time that she wasn't buying them for him, but truthfully, the kids weren't crazy about them. She tosses them at him, almost surprised when he catches.

"Read your mind." She teases.

He looks a little nervous for a moment. "Don't do that!"

She lifts an eyebrow and smirks. "Why? Would I not like the images of myself in there?"

He flounders, fumbling with the package of Jammie Dodgers and ultimately dropping them.

"Oi!" He interjects, but Clara just laughs.

* * *

The rest of the day goes without intergalactic tragedy, so Clara can only consider that a success.

The Doctor actually turns out to be more of a help than a hindrance. He seems eager to help, and having another person around to split duties with makes the week-alone thing a lot less stressful for Clara. He waters the plants and cooks dinner (a surprisingly delicious meal that didn't result in even one stove fire!) and backs Clara up when Angie refuses to do her homework. When midnight rolls around, and both kids are asleep and all the housework is completed, Clara almost feels a rush of success to marvel the success she feels after saving the world.

Oddly, the Doctor feels the same.

"Team TARDIS." He says, twirling around with a grin. "We kept this ship in tip-top order!"

She smiles at him. She isn't sure if it's how late it is, but she feels more vulnerable than normal, less able to hide her affection for him. She wraps her arms around him and hugs him close, her eyes closing and her mind shutting off to everything but him. He hugs her back.

"Thank you, Doctor." She tells him.

He kisses her head and rubs a hand down her back.

"Thank you, Clara."

When he leaves, her heart breaks, just a little. But that's nothing new. She's gotten used to her heart dropping when she hears the TARDIS dematerializing, and rising once more when she hears it return. It's become the constant push and pull of the tide of her heart.

She brushes her teeth and travels through the house, flipping off all the lights. She changes into her bed clothes and then sits down on her bed, trying to decide whether or not she wants to check her email or not before bed, when she hears the shrill sound of the TARDIS. Something sounds off about it though, and at first she's worried that she's hurt somehow, but then she realizes it sounds off because it's _closer_ than normal.

She's only just thought that when it materializes right in front of the window in her bedroom. She's torn between shock and elation, but both those emotions fade to confusion when two minutes pass and he's still not come out and explained.

She resigns herself to the fact that she's going to have to go in after him. She slips her house shoes on and sighs, crossing over to the TARDIS. When she enters, it's a little disorienting for a moment, because for all intents and purposes she now has an infinite world shoved inside of her bedroom. But that feeling fades to comfort. The TARDIS has long felt like home, ever since recuperating here after Trenzalore.

The Doctor's nowhere to be found in the console room.

"Where is he, then?" She asks the TARDIS. A light in the hallway to her right flickers, and Clara nods. "Oh, right. Thanks."

When she reaches his bedroom, his door's open. She peeks her head in, a little surprised to see him lying in his pajamas on the covers, a book open in his hands. He looks up as she enters.

"Hello!" He tells her cheerfully.

She's seen him in his pajamas many times before, but it's always as endearing each time. She can't help but grin at him for a moment. But the grin eventually fades to confusion.

"Mind telling me why your TARDIS is parked in my bedroom?" She asks.

He lifts his finger. "Ah, yes, let me explain!" He says. But then he falls silent. Clara crosses her arms and tilts her head to the right.

"Yes? I'm waiting." She pushes.

He nervously runs his nails up and down the spine of the book.

"Well, I was thinking I might stay and help some more." He finally mutters.

She smiles, and when he looks up and sees that, he relaxes. He smiles back.

"It could be fun." He adds.

Her smile isn't going anywhere. She sets a hand on the door frame and resists the urge to cross over and kiss him goodnight.

"Okay, if you want. I'll see you in the morning, roomie." She says.

That night, for the first time since Trenzalore, she doesn't have a nightmare.

* * *

Seeing that blue box, first thing that morning, makes her entire day.

She jumps out bed and goes about her normal routine—showering, getting dressed, waking Angie and Artie, making breakfast, seeing them out—and then hurries back to that blue box in her room.

Each time the TARDIS lets her in now without a struggle is just as exciting as the first. She has to admit that life in the TARDIS is much more pleasant when she doesn't mind your presence.

She finds him still in the bedroom, sound asleep on top of the covers. From what she remembers, he doesn't sleep much, so he must have gone a few days without sleeping any to sleep this long. She considers waking him normally—calling his name, giving his shoulder a shake—but what kind of fun would that be? And after all, if surviving a near-death experience had taught her anything, it was that you should always take advantage of the hidden moments of potential fun.

She reaches down and pulls her slippers off, so they won't make any dragging noises, and tip toes to the bed. She kneels down beside it so her head's level with his and reaches up, pressing a finger to his cheek. He shifts a little, but makes no grand notice. She rises a bit, just enough that she can look down on him, and traces over his cheekbones, his jawline, his nose. When he's asleep, he looks remarkably untroubled, and Clara likes the way that expression sits on his face. His forehead is smoother, his mouth isn't pulled into a straight line. She lightly touches the light shadows underneath his eyes, her touch hardly there, and then ghosts her fingers over his lips (part of her teasing, the other part genuinely curious). She's about to hover over his face to freak him out when his hand suddenly rises and grasps around the wrist to the hand that's currently tracing the line of his lower lip. For a second, she's scared of him, because his grip is tight and his eyes have opened without the slightest sense of grogginess. But once he sees her, his grip relaxes, and he takes her hand instead. He presses a kiss to her palm.

"What did I tell you about letting people in while I'm sleeping?" The Doctor calls to the TARDIS. The lights flicker for a moment like she's snickering, and Clara can't help but give her laughter the voice it deserves. The Doctor looks at her when she starts laughing.

"Oi! Don't you know what they say about waking sleeping Time Lords?" He asks.

She drops down onto his bed, practically sitting on his legs, and grins.

"No, I grew up on Earth. Is it like the one about not waking a sleeping bear?" She tries.

He points at her and nods once, seriously. "Pretty close to it!"

But after a minute of laughing he's half-heartedly joining in. And he looks so endearing, with his hair disheveled and his cheeks pink from sleep, that she finds herself leaning forward and lying against his chest, her arms wrapped around his middle. His laughter stops abruptly.

"What's this, then? Hugging time?" He asks. Clara just grips him tighter, because she doesn't want to explain the affection she feels, she just wants to feel it. She wants him to feel it, too.

He must, because he wraps his arms around her, holding her closer against him.

"Humany wumany mornings are better than Time Lord mornings." He murmurs. And the idea that they are sharing a human morning together makes her so happy she can't help but smile into his shirt.

It's obvious to both of them that the hugging time could have lasted a lot longer than they let it. When Clara sits back up, she fights off a coldness that trails after her the entire time she's waiting in her room for the Doctor. When he finally comes out of his snog box, dressed in his typical day attire, he offers her an excited grin.

"What's on the agenda for today? A chess match? Ooh, maybe swimming lessons! Kids do that, right? With the pools and the giant arm bubbles!" The Doctor holds his arms out, like he's wearing kids pool floats on his arms. Clara folds her arms and bites back laughter at his ridiculous antics. He continues. "Or we could polish the silver! I do love a good silver polishing!"

He continues talking as he walks from the room, and Clara follows after him, a little confused as to where he's going. He looks a bit like he doesn't really know himself. She watches him walk to the end of the hallway and then stick his head into Angie's room. He licks his finger and then holds it up in the air, frowning.

"Clara! Where are the children?" He gasps, spinning around to look at her. He fumbles with his sonic, pulling it out and obsessively scanning the air in the hallway. She calmly walks over and plucks it from his hand, ignoring his glare.

"At school." She tells him. She hands him the sonic back.

"They do that every single day?"

"Yeah, except for weekends and holidays."

"How…torturous." He settles with. He frowns. "So no swimming lessons, I guess." He perks up for a moment. "Unless you don't know how to swim! Do you?"

She motions for him to follow her and then begins making her way back downstairs.

"I do, sorry. And incidentally, so do Angie and Artie. No luck this time."

It turns out the Doctor finds something else he likes even more, however.

"Soufflé, soufflé, soufflé!" He cries gleefully. He's standing by the mixer watching as the sugar and egg whites are mixed. "Oh, Clara! Come here! This is my favorite part!"

Clara steps away from the stove as the chocolate melts and walks over behind the Doctor, for what must be at least the sixth time today. He's watching excitedly as the mixture comes to stiff peaks, clapping his hands joyfully.

"I just love how it goes from liquidy and slimy to all fluffy and firm!" He says.

Clara pats his shoulder.

"Sometimes it's like there's another kid in the house." She mutters, more to herself than him, and walks back over to her station.

After they share the finished soufflé, the Doctor helps her clean the downstairs bathroom. She tries to explain to him that scrubbing a bathtub with bleach isn't much fun at all, but he likes the way the elbow-length rubber gloves look too much to be dissuaded. He sits on the edge of the tub, in his tweed and bowtie, with long yellow gloves, and Clara can't stop herself from snapping a picture because it's just so ridiculous.

"Oh, it burns my eyes! Is it supposed to do that? The burning?" He asks, only a minute into scrubbing away.

Clara rises from where she was perched on the counter and hurries over.

"Did you get it in your eyes?" She asks.

He winces and nods and then he drops the sponge into the bottom of the tub, reaching up to grab at his eye with his bleach-covered gloved hands.

"Hold up, mister!" Clara swats his forearm, above the gloves. She sits on the edge and pushes his arms back down. "You have bleach on your hands."

She reaches up and takes his face into her hands, ignoring his protests, and tips it back. She stands up and then gently lifts his upper eyelid, peering intently at his cornea.

"I don't see any irritation." She tells him. "But maybe we should flush it out. Are Time Lord eyes like human eyes?"

"Clara!" He chokes, his eyeball frantically flickering from left to right. He tries to blink and she loses her grip. She curses.

"Would you hold still? I'm looking in your eye."

She pulls his eyelids back once more and leans in closer, so she's practically only a few inches from his face. He stops complaining and sits patiently, waiting.

"Your eye looks fine, I really don't think you got anything in it." She decides.

When she steps back, he blinks rapidly.

"I didn't get the actual _bleach _in my eye, just the fumes." He tells her. After a second of blinking he grins. "Oh, that's better!"

She glares. "Doctor, that's completely different. The fumes are uncomfortable for everyone."

She was so used to it by now that she'd forgotten how much it can make your eyes burn.

He glares down at the tub and rises abruptly, his nose thrust into the air.

"Bleach is NOT cool!" He declares.

And so he sits on the counter and watches her finish cleaning for the next twenty minutes, rambling on about chemical compositions and what not. All she can think about as she cleans is that, for a man that knows more than anyone else on the planet, he sure is lost when it comes to human things like this. She loves that more than she'd ever admit to him.

He insists on wearing the yellow gloves for a few more hours (a bleach-free pair, of course). She convinces him to wash the dishes while he's wearing them ("Might as well put them to good use!") and uses that time to phone her friend. By the time Angie and Artie are back home, they've simultaneously done nothing and everything. All the chores are completed, but Clara can't help but feel like time doubled itself somehow. It seemed to take her four times as long to get everything done as usual but somehow more was accomplished. She decides the Doctor's just a walking paradox and leaves it at that.

The four of them sit down for dinner that night. The Doctor does what not even Mr. Maitland can accomplish most nights and gets Angie to actually sit with them. She's only on her phone for half of it, which is such a huge accomplishment that Clara wants to kiss the Doctor. After dinner, all the homework is done without much whining, and Clara talks the Doctor into watching a movie with her. But he's fidgeting by the time the opening sequence is over and begins flipping through the rest of the DVDs.

"I'm in this one! Let's watch this one!" He cries, brandishing the Wizard of Oz in the air.

"You are not!" Clara scoffs.

"Am so!" He insists.

She shrugs. "Fine. Put it in. Let's see then."

He sits back down once it's playing and pulls Clara to his side, almost without thinking about it. She lifts the blanket on her legs and adjusts it so it's covering them both, and neither of them says anything, but they're both smiling.

The movie starts off fine, but when the tornado hits, Clara finds it difficult to breathe for a moment. Her chest feels heavy, like someone's placed a pile of heavy rocks on top of it, and she pushes the blanket off her hoping it will make it easier to inhale. When Dorothy looks out the window as the house is lifted, only to see that she's inside the swirling wind vortex, Clara cringes, subconsciously leaning closer into the Doctor's side. She hopes he won't notice, but of course he does.

"Clara?" He asks.

She screams at herself in her mind, telling herself to get a grip, but the fact that it's difficult to breathe only makes her feel even more panicky. All she can see is a different swirling vortex, all red and terrible as it pulls her into a thousand different pieces.

The Doctor gently grabs her shoulders, turning her to face him more, and he peers at her almost like he's examining her.

"You're home, Clara. You're home." He tells her, over and over again, and she can't believe him until he folds her into his arms. She forgets to be mad at herself for being vulnerable, forgets to feel embarrassed. She can only remember to hold him tighter because, deep down, she's still programmed to feel as if he's going to be taken away from her at any moment. She's still programmed to feel like she's all that stands between him and death.

She doesn't want to stop watching the movie, but he holds her hand the rest of the film. They share a good bit of laughter when the Doctor points himself out (he turns out to only be a brief shadow caught on film, to his utter disappointment).

He kisses her forehead before disappearing into the TARDIS, his eyes still a little concerned.

"What I said about waking Time Lords wasn't really true. You can wake me any time you want or need to." He tells her. She smiles at him.

"Goodnight, Doctor."

The night doesn't turn out too good, though. She doesn't have terrible dreams, but she is jarred awake suddenly in the middle of the night by a loud sound coming from downstairs. She turns over onto her side and peers at the clock in the dark, blinking against the glare and trying to make sense of her surroundings. At nearly four in the morning, no one should be downstairs. She sits up and listens carefully. Over the sound of the heater, she can hear another loud noise, like something hard being slammed into glass. She quickly rises from the bed.

The TARDIS lights illuminate her room well enough for her to locate something handy to use as a weapon (she chooses a metal lamp on her desk). She unplugs it as quietly as possible, grimacing as the floor creaks underneath her feet.

_This is ridiculous, _she thinks as she exits her room, lamp in hand, but all she can think about is that all the people she has to protect are in this house, and so she's not about to let someone go running about freely.

She checks on Angie and Artie first, but they're sound asleep. She closes their doors behind her—as if that would somehow deter an intruder—and tip toes her way downstairs. Her heart is pounding away in her chest as she listens closer to the noise. She sticks her head over the staircase railing, peering down the foyer towards the kitchen, and listens. She decides it's definitely coming from the backdoor.

She tightens her grip on the lamp and hurries to the door, her heart pounding, and when she stands in front of it she's confused at first by what she sees. The noise is coming from what appears to be a watch on a chain, knocking into the window over and over again. She leans against the glass and follows the chain with her eyes, sighing in annoyance when she realizes who her intruder is.

She unlocks the door and slides it open. She steps out into the yard and backs up until she can see the ladder against the house and the alien man who's currently on it, his fob watch beating into the window like an errant burglar.

"Doctor!" She hisses. He doesn't respond, and for a moment she thinks he's sleep walking, but then she notices that he's bobbing his head along to whatever music is playing through the headphones perched on his head. She walks over and lifts the metal lamp, tapping him on the back of the thigh with it once.

He jumps, flailing and almost falling off the ladder. His headphones slide off his head and go tumbling to the ground, an ancient tape player falling with them. He grabs back onto the ladder and laughs nervously, peering down in the dark at Clara.

"Oh, hello! I was going to sleep, but then I remembered this loose shingle I saw a month ago, and—why do you have a lamp?"

Clara gaped at him. She looked down at the lamp and then back up at him.

"Never mind the lamp! Come down from there! Four in the morning isn't exactly the time you fix a shingle. The neighbors are probably phoning the police!"

"Oh, I popped back a couple of hours and slipped letters underneath their doors informing them that I was going to be doing some constructive maintenance and not to worry." He grins, proudly, and Clara can only cover her face with her hand for a moment and sigh. Mr. Maitland was going to have a lot of questions when he got home. "But seriously, why the lamp?"

She groaned in frustration. "To beat a burglar's head in with! Come down!"

He frowned, turning precariously on the ladder to peer at her from a better angle.

"A burglar? What burglar? Where?" He peered around nervously.

"There's not—just come down!"

He listened this time. She held the base of the ladder as he clambered down, a hammer and nails made of a strange metal sticking out of his jacket pocket. When they were finally both on the ground, he continued his questions.

"Burglar?" He asked.

"Constructive maintenance at four in the morning?" She shot back. She reached down and pulled at his loose fob watch. "This was knocking into the glass door. I thought someone was breaking in."

He grabbed the lamp from her grasp.

"You were going to go against a burglar with _this_?" He demanded.

She snatched it back. "Yeah, well, it's better than a screwdriver that doesn't even screw anything!"

"Don't diss the sonic!" He pouted. "Why didn't you come wake me if you thought someone was breaking in?"

She faltered for a beat. To be honest, the thought hadn't even crossed her mind. She was far too busy thinking about how she had to protect the people in the house.

"Well you wouldn't have been there if I had, would you?" She said instead. "You were out here making the noise!"

"I would have been in there had it been a real burglar!"

She adjusted the lamp in her arms. "I had it under control."

He's about to reply when they hear a shout from the yard one fence over.

"Oi! Would you two stop bickering like an old married couple and go to bed?!"

Clara shoots a glare at the Doctor.

"Sorry, Mrs. Ledbetter!" She calls back.

She takes the Doctor's hand.

"Come on."

Once inside, she shuts and locks the door, exhaustion sneaking back up on her.

"I'm going back to bed." She declares.

She sees the Doctor sit down on the couch from the corner of her eye.

"Okay."

She turns to him.

"What, you're just going to sleep here and keep watch for burglars, are you?"

"Yep."

She turns her back so she can smile.

"Alright, then. See you in the morning."

She sets the lamp back where it was. Even though she doesn't need anyone to look after her, it does feel nice to know that someone is.

* * *

From that point on, he sleeps on the sofa. Clara wonders if maybe he remembered that there are things on Earth that can hurt her just as easily as there are things in space that can, too. She knows the difference between those two things, for him, is that he's only there to protect her in one of those situations. And so he makes it both of them.

On the fourth morning, she wakes up to find the kids already sent off to school and all the chores already done.

"I wanted to let you sleep in." He tells her.

She rises onto her tip toes and presses a soft kiss to his lips, without even thinking about it. When she lowers back down, they're both blushing.

"A thank-you kiss." She hurriedly says.

He lifts his hand and rests it on his lips in almost a daze.

"Of course." He responds, just as quickly.

She's slightly uncomfortable for the rest of the morning, and she isn't sure of why until lunch. She looks at him, sitting at the table sorting the silverware, and realizes she's so startled because the way she kissed him was so domestic. It was the kind of kiss she'd seen her mother and father share countless times growing up. She'd kissed him in the echo life she remembers best, the one where she was a barmaid and a governess, but that kiss was all passion. This was lived-in comfort and affection.

She tells herself she needs to begin distancing herself once more, to protect her heart, so of course she doesn't listen to herself and sits down beside him. She leans against his arm, watching as he makes a TARDIS replica using the silverware, and tries not to do something dumb like kiss him again.

"How long are you staying, Doctor?" She asks him. He's already stayed longer than she'd ever thought possible.

He looks up from his replica and turns to her.

"How long's Mr. Maitland gone for?"

"Three more days."

"Three more days, then."

She smiles at him when he turns back to his creation.

* * *

The kids get used to having him around and, even worse, so does Clara.

He knows the daily routine almost as well as she does and finds ways to improve it. And it gets harder and harder to remind herself why it's a bad idea to let herself fully fall. He obviously cares a lot about her, because she knows he doesn't do domestic on principal but here he is _living it_, but something is holding her back. When she wakes up from a nightmare on the sixth night, mid-scream, to find him sitting on her bed and holding her close with the most haunted expression in his eyes, she realizes what the problem is. All along, she hasn't been protecting herself. She's been protecting him. It doesn't really come as that big of a shock.

Because, in the end, the truth is that she will leave him. She will leave him and break his hearts more than they're already broken, and there's nothing she can do about that. No matter how hard she tries, she can never stay with him like he needs, like he wants. And that breaks her heart just a little bit then, too.

She pulls him underneath the covers with her, still half asleep and shaking from her nightmare, and grips him close. She is overcome with the love she feels for him, the love she'd never allowed herself to feel fully—minus right before she jumped into his timestream—, and the sorrow she can't escape.

Her tears make damp circles on the front of his shirt.

"I love you and I'm sorry." She whispers. His arms tighten around her. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you from this, too."

"Hey, hey," he starts, and he leans down and punctuates each word with a kiss to the top of her head. He continues, his voice soft. "I never wanted saving from this. I never asked for that."

_I did,_ she wants to say, but she doesn't. She just realized that when she leaves him eventually, he won't be coming with her, and that hurts almost as much.

"The future is in the future, Clara." He tells her. "It's important to know that it's there, but you should never let it keep you from doing the things you want. You should never let the "what ifs" keep you from living. You only use them to make you more aware of how precious the things you already have are." She can feel his gaze on her so she looks up, her face tear-streaked, and smiles back at him. He strokes her cheek and then leans in, so their noses are pressed together. "You are so precious to me, and so temporary, but that only makes me love you more." She's numb at first when he kisses her, her mind spinning and her body under the momentary impression that she's falling, but then she's looping her arms around his neck and sitting up fully. If she was full of passion the one time they really kissed in Victorian London, he's the one full of it this time. He weaves his hands into her hair and kisses her almost desperately, but at the same time with a practiced comfort.

By the time she comes to realize exactly what's happening, he pulls back.

"Everything is okay." He soothes, and she falls back into his arms, because for some reason, she believes him.

* * *

Her Time Lord isn't there when she wakes. His blue box is gone, and she feels like he took her soul with it. She stares at the empty spot in her bedroom, doubts filling her mind, when she hears Mr. Maitland's voice flittering up the stairs.

She realizes he got back this morning and the Doctor, after seeing to everything, left before he knew he was there. When she climbs out of bed, she sees a note taped to the back of the door. "_See you in a few" _is all it says, but then Clara's smiling, because she remembers. Today's Wednesday.

Maybe they've only got a limited amount of Wednesday at their disposal, but she knows that's all the more reason to make them better than ever before.


End file.
